4 thoughts on “We Must Boost the Signal, Page 59”

1. What’s going on here? So does this means every woman in the world kill themselves (or rather feed themselves to the Gel) leaving only men alive? Does this sound like a misogynist ‘fantasy’ in it’s ultimate conclusion?

   • It’s an apocalyptic horror story, drawn from many influences, among them Frank Herbert’s . I wrote it because I wanted to write a horror story, and I have it on the best possible authority that this is how stories like that are written. The following quotation is long but all worthwhile:

     Popular authors do not and apparently cannot appreciate the fact that true art is obtainable only by rejecting normality and conventionality in toto, and approaching a theme purged utterly of any usual or preconceived point of view. Wild and “different” as they may consider their quasi-weird products, it remains a fact that the bizarrerie is on the surface alone; and that basically they reiterate the same old conventional values and motives and perspectives. Good and evil, teleological illusion, sugary sentiment, anthropomorphic psychology — the usual stock in trade, and all shot through with the eternal and inescapable commonplace…Who ever wrote a story from the point of view that man is a blemish on the cosmos, who ought to be eradicated? As an example — a young man I know lately told me that he means to write a story about a scientist who means to dominate the earth, and who to accomplish his ends trains and overdevelops germs…and leads armies of these in the manner of Egyptian plagues. I told him that although this theme has promise, it is made utterly commonplace by assigning the scientist a normal motive. There is nothing outré about wanting to conquer the earth: Alexander, Napoleon, and Wilhelm II wanted to do that. Instead, I told my friend, he should conceive a man with a morbid, frantic, shuddering hatred of the life-principle itself, who wishes to extirpate from the planet every trace of biological organism, animal, and vegetable alike, including himself. That would be tolerably original. But after all, originality lies with the author. One can’t write a weird story of real power without perfect psychological detachment from the human scene, and a magic prism of imagination which suffuses theme and style alike, with that grotesquerie and disquieting distortion characteristic of morbid vision. Only a cynic can create horror — for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving demonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.

     That’s H.P. Lovecraft, writing to Weird Tales editor Edwin Baird, as cited in Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy against the Human Race (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2010), p. 59.

     I don’t know if I’m as thoroughgoing a cynic as is one needs to be to write a great horror story (and sure, there’s the not-insignificant issue of having only modest literary skill too), but I’ll confess that I’m not unfamiliar with the desire to with to pull human illusions to pieces and mock them.

     • I’ll be honest with you, your villain sucks. It does not instill dread.

   • I hated this story, I mean I really hated it, but Tujil, stop inserting your paranoia into EVERYTHING

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